One hot day at the beginning of the advance, I took Bill Hasted, my quiet-spoken Chief Engineer, a little upstream of Kalewa and said, ‘Billy, there’s the river and there are the trees,’ pointing to the great forests within half a mile of the bank ‘In two months I want five hundred tons of supplies a day down that river.’ He looked thoughtfully at the river and the trees, and then at me. ‘The difficult we will do at once; the impossible will take a little longer,’ he quoted from a saying in frequent use in the Fourteenth Army, and added with a grin, ‘For miracles we like a month’s notice!’
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